This is an extract from this month’s edition of The Journal’s monthly FactCheck newsletter, which looks at what misinformation is being shared right now and points at trends in factchecking. Find out more and sign up here or at the bottom of the page.
IN THE LAST few weeks, Ireland’s misinformation sphere has been dominated by a concerted campaign against sex education in secondary schools.
This kind of misinformation isn’t a new phenomenon: we’ve already seen it play out last year, when proposals to update the Relationships and Sexuality module of the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) syllabus caused a stir after certain groups argued that children shouldn’t be taught about gender identity, with some saying there should be more Christian values on the curriculum.
That initial campaign passed largely unnoticed, but it appears to have created foundations for another attack on the teaching of SPHE, which has gained a lot more traction and has caught the Government, educators, parents and sections of the public off guard.
It has become one of the biggest misinformation stories in Ireland this year and has proven tricky to debunk because of how it is presented.
The basis of the campaign is a video posted on YouTube at the end of September that has provided a false narrative about how sex education is taught in schools.
The clip, titled “SPHE Teacher’s Whistleblower Interview – What Happens in the Classroom Stays in the Classroom” comprises a 27-minute interview with a teacher who claims she resigned from her job because she was expected to teach extreme sexual material to children.
Throughout the video, the teacher – a woman called Mary Creedon – speaks about her experience attending a course for SPHE teachers at Dublin City University (DCU).
For the avoidance of any doubt, the course is strictly for adults: secondary pupils themselves do not attend, and the material on the course is designed for teachers.
It’s important to clarify this, because the confusion created by the video hinges on its attempts to blur the lines between what is taught on the DCU course and what students are taught in classrooms.
During the interview, Creedon outlines a range of material she was shown on the DCU course, which is designed for and attended by what are called SPHE co-ordinators (i.e. secondary school teachers who oversee how SPHE is taught at their school).
Creedon implies that some of the materials that are shown to adults on the course – animated images of people taking part in sex acts, terms describing certain sex acts, discussions about whether it’s okay to watch pornography – are being taught to those adults so they can then teach/repeat them to children.
She is described from the outset as a ‘whistleblower’, someone who is giving the world an insight into the morally depraved world of SPHE lessons where schoolchildren are becoming overly sexualised by adults in a space where their parents don’t even realise what’s happening.
The video has since been shared across WhatsApp and social media, with parents asking whether what Creedon is saying is true.
In the ensuing hysteria, elected politicians have come on board.
At the start of October, Aontú TD Peadar Tóibín asked a Parliamentary Question about the Minister’s role in formulating the DCU course, while last week, Fianna Fáil TD Seán Fleming also addressed the course’s existence, saying that “no material of this explicit nature should ever be shown or discussed in schools”.
The situation has got so out of hand that DCU issued a statement earlier this week saying that it is exploring legal action because of “targeted attacks” on academic staff who teach the course, including threats of violence, misogynistic and homophobic slurs, and defamatory remarks (though there is no indication that Creedon or anyone associated with the video is behind these incidents).
If you watch the video without any prior knowledge of SPHE or who is producing the video, it is easy to see how so many people have been taken in by it, and why the video is such a successful piece of misinformation content.
Creedon comes across as a genuinely concerned citizen, an ordinary, unbiased figure who has emerged out of nowhere to tell the public something they should really know about.
The fact she is an insider who is able to reference legitimate course materials and lessons is compelling, particularly because she has the authority to speak about two information gaps among the public: what children are taught in SPHE classes; and what material teachers are given on the DCU course.
The reality is though that the course itself is designed to educate teachers about how to handle sensitive issues when they are teaching sex education in classrooms.
A distortion of this frames the video from the off: within the first two minutes, Creedon describes how the materials used on the DCU course are “totally inappropriate” and expresses concerns that children will become “very upset [and] anxious” if the same materials are used in sex education lessons.
Her claims are given more apparent weight when she includes a litany of examples of some of the material given to teachers, including sexual language and illustrations – shown on screen while Creedon talks – of a woman masturbating and images showing sexual activities between heterosexual and homosexual couples.
At one point, Creedon also describes being told about a research paper which she claims says “it’s okay to watch porn”, and uses this as a launch point to suggest that critiques of pornography by students could be used by teachers as part of classroom-based assessments.
If someone watching the video stopped and thought about this, they may be able to recognise it as misinformation.
Would a teacher legally be able to ask children to watch pornography in a classroom setting?
No, because it would be highly illegal to do that, but the fact that the suggestion appears amid a rake of other claims and goes unchallenged by the interviewer allows it to become part of a wider narrative about children being sexualised.
That narrative is driven by a bigger question that the video poses: why would SPHE teachers on the DCU course be given sexual materials if they are not for teachers to pass on to children taking SPHE lessons?
The simple answer is that the DCU course materials are for teachers who are learning how to teach, which is a different learning process to children learning about relationships and sexuality.
The DCU course gives teachers – as adults – the space to critically explore aspects of relationships and sexuality, and to prepare them for topics that might be difficult or sensitive when they are raised in a classroom setting.
Rather than facilitating teachers to actively bring highly sexualised materials to children, the course enables teachers to discuss highly sexualised topics in an age-appropriate manner if and when they come up in a classroom.
If children ask about pornography, a teacher who has critically explored it as part of their SPHE training can more easily discuss with a student why it is not a good place to learn about sex or relationships and how it can be damaging.
But the video re-packages this approach so that parents are led to believe that an SPHE course for secondary school children uses the exact same materials as an entirely separate university course for SPHE teachers.
It is a bait-and-switch misinformation narrative that is so persuasive because of who is presenting it (Creedon, a seemingly ordinary person with insider knowledge) and its reliance on actual course material that can be seen in the video (i.e. the DCU course materials).
That point has repeatedly been made by DCU, the Department of Education, and Minister for Education Norma Foley - all of whom have stated clearly that the video misrepresents what children are being taught in SPHE classes.
What’s even more revealing about the video is who is behind it, and their involvement in previous misinformation campaigns against SPHE and sex education.
The clip of Creedon was uploaded to the YouTube channel of the Natural Women’s Council, an anti-trans group that describes itself as a “grassroots non-profit group formed to protect children, women and families in Ireland”.
The group, which is not a registered charity and should not be confused with the similarly named National Women’s Council of Ireland, was founded by Jana Lunden and was involved in previous campaigns against SPHE mentioned at the start of this newsletter.
Lunden was also involved in high-profile anti-LGBTQ+ demonstrations, when libraries were targeted last year for the LGBTQ+ reading materials they had on offer, or for holding drag story events.
Despite initial appearances, Creedon has campaigned against updates to sex education on the SPHE course last year, when she was interviewed on Newstalk claiming that teaching children about gender identity was “flawed”.
While on Newstalk, Creedon said she was a member of a group called the Irish Education Alliance, which claims to be a teachers’ organisation without political or religious affiliations.
However, its website lists its support for campaigns against vaccines, against LGBTQ+ material in libraries, and against proposed reforms to the SPHE syllabus.
We asked Creedon if she would like to make a comment about the reaction to the video, including how it can be defined as misinformation. She said she would provide a statement to The Journal FactCheck but nothing had been received by publication time.
Unsurprisingly, there is an international dimension to the overarching misinformation campaigns against sex education.
In the United States in particular, the Christian right has sought to undermine sex education for decades in the exact same way we’re seeing in Ireland: by attacking gender identity and claiming that children are becoming overly sexualised in school.
When Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law was passed in March 2022 and prohibited sex education lessons about LGBTQ-related issues, the measure noted – in remarkably similar language to that used by Creedon in her interview – that such themes were “not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate”.
As an example of just how far certain groups have gone to import these narratives, one part of the Irish Education Alliance warns that Critical Race Theory an academic field about racial bias in society that has become a flashpoint in the US – is being imposed in Irish schools through SPHE, even though this is very much not the case.
Ultimately, the ‘SPHE Whistleblower’ video is just the latest attempt by Irish groups to import culture war talking points from abroad.
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